Fatigue in rubber: State of the art

Rubber components subjected to fluctuating loads often fail due to the nucleation and growth of defects or cracks. This study review the rubber types with their properties and applications, review the analysis approaches that are currently available for predicting fatigue life in rubber. Both crack nucleation and crack growth approaches are considered. A discussion of each approach and applications of these approaches have been applied in engineering analysis are presented. Also review the factors that affect on mechanical fatigue life of rubber components. Four major categories of factors are reviewed here: the effects of mechanical loading history, environmental effects, effects of rubber formulation, and effects due to dissipative aspects of the constitutive response of rubber. The constitutive models are widely used in Finite Element Analysis FEA packages for rubber components are presented; and presented here the applications of FEA to study the fatigue lifetime of rubber.